Description of Gargoyle from the manual: Half-demon and half-bat. these wicked red beasts are the Order's guard dogs of the sky.

Description of Fire Gargoyle from the manual: As if flying demons wern't enough, Fire Gargoyles toss balls of fire down on their unsuspecting enemy.

Tactical analysis

Gargoyles are smaller than other bad guys making them harder to hit. The ability to fly and their small size grants them a high level of mobility and ability to access small areas. In some ways, fighting them is like fighting Lost Souls in Doom.

The Fire Gargoyle doesn't possess either the ability to dash or attack the player in melee like the standard Gargoyle.

While Gargoyles may be easy to dispatch individually, they often appear in large groups where they can potentially overwhelm the player. A single Gargoyle of either type can be taken out easily with the Staff, although the Gauntlets of the Necromancer are preferable, and small groups can be dispatched with the Elven Wand. For larger clusters, the Ethereal Crossbow is a surprisingly good suppression weapon, as its projectile spread means at least two Gargoyles will be hit when firing from afar, and the damage of each arrow means the Gargoyles will go down in scores.

When killed, Gargoyles fall to the floor and break apart into a pile of gore. They are one of only two enemies in Heretic that can be gibbed, in which case the pieces are smaller and what looks like the Gargoyle's ribcage is visible.

Note that the game engine does not consider regular Gargoyles and Fire Gargoyles to be the same kind of monster. Therefore, it is in fact possible for a regular Gargoyle and a Fire Gargoyle to harm each other, and to infight.

These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.

Fire Gargoyles are immune to eachothers fireballs and hence can not damage each other excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods.